Archive for July, 2015

Over one thousands experts, professors, renowned intellectuals, Stephen Hawking, even Elon Musk, the unavoidable Noam Chomsky, and, ironically enough, plenty of the actors of the computer industry, have signed a naive, hypocritical, and ineffective letter to ban “autonomous killing systems” (the letter is to be presented soon). Their agenda? Mass distraction, to divert us from the real problem, while making us believe that they really care. If they really cared, they would promote the solution I advocate, the one and only.

They pontificate: “The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI [Artificial Intelligence] arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable.” Is that the key question? What about the CO2 crisis, with its melting poles and increasingly acid oceans.

Autonomous Killing Systems Already Exist, But Direct Democracy Does Not

As if there was not a continual Artificial Intelligence arms race? There has been one, since 1940, or so. And there better be, if democracies want to stay on top, and world war avoided. Automated killing machines are moving swiftly from science fiction to reality…

“The deployment of such systems is – practically if not legally – feasible within years, not decades,”

Excuse me? The PHALANX anti-aircraft, and anti-missile system is an automated fire-control system enabling it to automatically search for, detect, track, engage, and kill. Entirely autonomously, yes. It’s nickname is “R2-D2”, from the half smart robot by the same name in Star Wars. All major capital ships of the USA, and those of 16 allies, are equipped with it. Each American aircraft carrier carries several, covering all approaches.

So what are the worthies talking about?

Nothing. They are just posing as good people. They want us to believe they deserve our trust. They are smart enough to know no state which can equip itself with autonomous killing systems will hesitate to do so. So their approach is both immoral, thoroughly hypocritical, and deeply ineffective.

Forbidding democracies to use autonomous killing systems will make those a monopoly of dictatorships. It’s a no-go approach, as far as any half-smart military is concerned.

So what is the correct approach, oh great know-it all?

Granted that democracies will be anxious to equip themselves with autonomous killing systems, be it only to save soldiers’ lives, how can we make sure such systems will not veer into the situation depicted in the Terminator or Matrix movies, where machines take over?

Very simple: Direct Democracy. Direct Democracy is the solution to rule over robots, not just plutocrats. If every citizen is involved in the utilization, and the decisions to use such autonomous systems, then we will be as safe as safe can be.

The worthies and their petition want to distract from the one and only obvious solution. Instead, they propose a pious, ill-informed vow. Which will make the deep state, the intelligence agencies, the military and its contractors laugh derisively, in the leading democracies.

Right now, very few individuals are in the know about how technology is used to subjugate human beings. A handful of Senators in the USA, a handful at the White House. The rest of those who know are in the military. As long as this goes on, the temptation to use technology to serve a few, and their robotic servants will be irresistible. The remedy is that we all be involved, and in control. We need wikicontrol.

London is getting ever richer. Why this is, is, at first sight, a mystery. San Francisco is also getting richer. But that’s not mysterious: thousands of beaver geeks are busy building “apps” there, San Francisco actually produces products, common products which common people love to use. And code writers prefer to live there, in a big city, next to Silicon Valley’s centers of power and innovation. Apps made in San Francisco are then sold worldwide.

Excuse Us Not, We Are Building All over

But London? What does London make? The answer is not what London makes, but what it harbors… which we abhor. An increasingly serious world problem. The New York Times’ Roger Cohen ponders the situation:

“The streets look the same — if spruced for the new gentry from drab and dreary to spick and span — but London’s animating spirit is another. Money, and I mean the world’s money not Britain’s, now determines how London looks, sets it apart from the rest of the country, and defines what it is… it resembles a mausoleum reserved for the occasional use of the globe’s peripatetic rich and their ample staffs.

Real estate as investment and tax dodge, rather than as dwelling, is a life-sucking force. Georgian mansions of cream-colored splendor sit there, empty much of the time, with a banner to the great unwashed on their shuttered windows proclaiming: Stay out!…

The faraway “Continent” of my youth — full of such unfamiliar and vaguely suspicious items as garlic and French intellectuals and edible food — has defied the Channel and arrived. London and gastronomy are no longer strangers.

French and Polish and Romanian youths pour into London in search of a living wage and passable English, followed by young Spaniards and Italians. That they are undeterred by how crazy-expensive London life is testifies to the economic slump and high unemployment across much of Europe.”

It is most reassuring for me when mainstream commentators adopt pretty much word for word what i have been saying for years. All the following ideas I brandished in the past, iconoclastically:

“London is skewed in dangerous ways, indicative of European and global problems. House prices keep jumping. Cranes are everywhere, hoisting new luxury developments into being. Some are certainly for wealthy Greeks fleeing their country’s problems. There’s a bubble. The capital has become a glittering enclave in a country often resentful of its dominance. It presides with an air of superiority, like squeaky-clean Singapore looking down on Southeast Asia.

An alternative way of looking at the push for independence by Scotland, now a one-party Scottish nationalist state, is to think of London as having seceded from the rest of Britain, a city-state unto itself. There is widespread resentment of the city’s self-absorption. An alternative way of looking at the way London sucks in money and the affluent from the rest of Europe is as a reflection of the stagnation and unresolved structural problems of the eurozone. In some ways, London reflects both a country and a continent in which the fracturing forces are, for the first time since World War II, stronger than the unifying forces. London is a capital of culture, but also of inequality and tax evasion.”

An alternative way to look at the most recent phase of the Greek crisis is that it consisted in several Machiavellian shows, entangled with each other. Tsipras wanted to claim he had no choice, but to take some strong measures which he knew and wanted, to take. Merkel and Hollande did not feel like negotiating with Cameron, something they sure could not do, as long as Greece is on the front burner. Cameron himself may have felt that the Greece crisis gave him an excuse for having had no time for significant negotiations with the EU, thus dissimulating his impotence. After all, Cameron is only PM of Great Britain, not the power behind London’s growth. That is what really pulls the strings: world plutocracy, un-taxed, uncowed, unabashed, indomitable.

Politics is nothing, if not Machiavellian. London itself is so outrageous, that it presents, by its very absurdity, both crisis and opportunity.

London’s average metrics are getting ever richer, on the back of We The People, worldwide. And Roger to conclude, in a style reminiscent of yours truly:

“[London] is also a magnet for people looking for a safe place for their money. Having made it in countries like Russia and China with a cowed press, rampant corruption and no rule of law, oligarchs and crony capitalists reach the conclusion that they like nothing as much as democratic systems with real legal systems and a vigorous press. Having trashed the West they trust the West with their money.

Autocratic hypercapitalism without Western checks and balances produces new elites whose dream is an American or British lifestyle and education for their children, and whose other goal is to buy into the rule of law by acquiring real estate, driving up prices in prime markets to the point where the middle classes of those countries, with incomes stagnant or falling (and taxed), are pushed aside.

London is the capital of these trends. That is the different reek, of something amiss and skewed and wrong, in its purring streets.”

Roger does not go into the nitty-gritty of the tax code. However, this is the core of London’s ascendancy. The tax code allows “non-doms” and plutocrats from all over the world to come and situate themselves, tax free, in London, for at least seven years. No questions asked.

London has turned into Monaco, writ large. With much less stringent admission criterions. Plus the added twist of world financial conspiracies, so unethical that the law of the USA does not allow them to be conducted, even in New York.

England (that is, London) and the USA (in particular Delaware, Wyoming, etc.) are the world’s largest tax havens, for world plutocracy. The serious money is hidden in “dark pools” where the real owners cannot be traced, in the present system: the situation is similar to tax evasion in Greece, but much worse.

The leaders of the USA, Wall Street, and London thus try to control the world, by inviting the controlling plutocrats to reside there. It’s a sort of Faustian bargain, writ large. The New York Times has made a whole study of wanted international criminals, and completely opaque arrangements controlling the mighty towers in New York.

Apparently the idea is to sell our democracy, in exchange for the influence, you plutocrats, you, our beloved plutocrats in residence, exert upon the world.

The price which is paid is not just measured in how much soul goes down the drain, but in the influence of plutocracy on politics. Academic studies have shown most decisions in the USA, have to do with what the .1% want, not what We The People of the USA want. The same phenomenon blossoms in England. Hence the Scottish rejection of the London wealth phenomenon.

It is high time that the Scottish rejection for plutocracy supreme spread around the world. If we do not reject plutocracy in a timely manner, it will come to control us completely, until a new serfdom becomes a fact.

Some cackle that whenever one mentions Nazism, one has lost the debate (Godwin’s Law). Verily, of chickens today we talk.

Is the idea that nothiAdd Mediang compare to you, oh, Nazism? As in love songs? Nothing compares to Nazism, oh (my love?) Assuredly we are living in strange times. Yet, reality is even stranger.

Nazism, for want of a better word, is firmly anchored in the German mood, from way back. So much for Nazism being an “accident”, caused by “one” gangster, Hitler, who made Germans kill, purely accidentally and without any inclination to do so, 70 million people (make that more than 100 million, when counting the first round, World War One, and associated distraction, like exterminating Native Namibians).

The first pogroms of the Middle Ages started when the herds of Crusaders, during the First Crusade, reached German speaking lands. (Although the Crusade was launched from French speaking areas, and this, by the Pope, personally.)

This murderously racist, not just racist, mood persisted, over centuries: Prussia had anti-Jewish (and also anti-Polish) laws, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.

Geeks who subscribe to Godwin’s Principle will never know any of that, as they will declare that their history professors have lost the debate, as soon as they mentioned Nazism.

Meanwhile, geeks are preparing to make us all slaves of skynet. They can now take control of cars at a distance. Something I experienced years ago when, more than once, uninvited forces took control of computers of mine at a distance, big time.

That obscurantism of making Nazism incomparable, never to mention it, that God Win Law, is well named: Let me please introduce GOD, who is all about ignorance, that’s how those who promote him WIN.

The Godwin Law is strong in the USA. This encourages young Americans not to enquire about the troubling pattern of USA based plutocracy in supporting Hitler.

Let me put it in one sentence: if the USA had helped the French Republic by declaring war to Hitler in 1939, or in the first half of 1940, neither the Holocaust, nor the full horror of World War Two would have happened. That is, of course, a terrible revelation. It is a more comfortable strategy to block the conversation before it starts.

Geeks spend all day programming, they have to replace the culture they never had, with a cute appearance, in search of some intellectual dignity. Deliberate buffoonery masquerading as superior wisdom, enables them to cover-up their crass ignorance, especially to themselves.

Once again, in connection with their attempt to build Skynet, the not-so mythical system where machines control everything (as found in the movie Terminator), and their demonstrated past relation with NSA and other occult organizations, this is quite troubling.

If nothing compares to the worst baddies, so they should never be mentioned, will geeks extend their desinvolte courtesy to banksters? Mention banksters, people, and you have lost the debate? This is de facto what is happening: Greece is all over the Main Stream Media, but the connection between said crisis, and its genesis in banking, rarely mentioned.

The original name of god in Hebrew was: The-One-whose-Name-Shall-Not-Be-Uttered. Thus by refusing to name Nazism, one makes it divine, in the old biblical way.

I propose the exact opposite. I propose Nazism is a paradigm of nationalism and socialism gone wrong. I propose that Nazism was the culmination of a process.

I propose that much of the German mood was Nazi, from 1815 to 1945. At the very least (considering Luther, it should rather be, from 1515 to 1945). After all, the racist and vicious “legal” crackdown on the Jews started in 1815, after French rule was terminated (and Europe broken by an economic system that benefited Britain).

(That Germany did not really exist in 1815, is besides the point: German speaking areas existed, and Metternich, in cooperation with Prussia, set up the anti-Jewish (Nazi) laws.)

If I am correct and Germany was Nazi from 1815 until 1945, refusing to talk about Nazism is refusing to talk about Germany, from 1815 to 1945. How to buttress my case?

Bismarck had a strong socialist bend. He imposed national health care on Germany in 1863. He was also an expansionary nationalist successfully attacking Denmark, Austria, France, while keeping Poland under the Prussian boot. The German dictatorship lived very well while treating the Jews badly.

By 1900 CE, the principle of mistreating people for their (alleged or not) race had been generalized to a holocaust in South-West Africa, of a type never seen before. How come? Maybe the cult of Kant explains much. Kant was, in practice a racist and an enslaver. That was Kant’s most practical impact: he advised European and American politicians to enslave inferior races. : “The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.”

In 1914, the Germans launched a world war outright, thus committing the exact crime which condemned the rich wine merchant (and foreign minister) Von Ribbentrop to hang slowly at Nuremberg. Germans also committed, during their blunt attack many other war crimes. Enough to hang most of the top German generals, at the same justice been applied in 1919 as in 1945. The worst crimes were thoroughly documented.

A two year old Belgian girl who was bathing in a river was killed deliberately by German soldiers. That was thoroughly documented, as were the cold blooded killing of 160 civilians in the same area that day. Why? The Germans, in this third week of August, in this war they had launched, had been unnerved by a violent French counter offensive. That day 27,000 (twenty-seven THOUSANDS) FRENCH soldiers died in combat. How did the Germans react? By killing two year old little Belgian girls.

The big mistake the allies made in 1919 was not to find out, judge and hang, enough of these criminals. Instead, they were let go, and were basically told it was cool to be monstrous, when one is German. So they did it again, even more blatantly, twenty years later.

A lot of the commanders of 1939 already commanded in 1918 (Goering led the Von Richthofen squadron, after the death of the Red Baron; in 1939 Goering, son of his father the war criminal, commanded the entire German airforce, and, naturally enough, engaged in war crimes).

The deliberate, conspiratorial attack of August 1914, was certainly nationalistic: the initial mission was to destroy the French Republic, to make space for German plutocracy. Moreover the German Socialist Party, the SPD, some of whose principals made a show of their ignorant hatred for the Greeks, fully cooperated. In two words: National-Socialism again.

Adolf Hitler and his Nazis in all this? Just a bouquet final for German Nazism. This is the mood which resurfaced in the anger against the Greeks. Make no mistake: anger can be very good. But only when directed to the real culprits, not the innocent bystanders. In the Greek crisis, the real culprits were banks, plutocrats, Goldman Sachs, German regulators (who allowed the Drachma in at twice its rate). But the average Greek?

Tribal German madness started way back. Way before Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) applied the (ill-defined) concept of “race” to nationalist theory, thereby inventing ethnic nationalism. Bad German philosophy, widely admired, all the way back to the ill-fated Teutons, and the ill-fated Arminius (“Hermann”).

Germany was unified by the German Franks, precisely because the Confederation of the Franks rejected primitive tribalism, and embraced tolerance. It’s never too late to remember the past.

The moods at the root of Nazism, tribalism, and the social instinct, are strong, and can be excellent, given the appropriate circumstances. That, per se, makes it not just very important, and always a temptation, but also very dangerous. It needs to be counterbalanced with a strong will to disorder.

Meanwhile BMW recalled discreetly two million cars (because they could be taken over at a distance). Skynet, the taking over by the machines, will be ineluctable, if what we prefer is order. What’s more ordered than a machine?

The “Right Honorable David Cameron, MP”, Prime Minister of Great Britain, gave a speech entitled “Extremism”. What Cameron truly meant was “Islamism”. I have been thinking about writing an essay on Cameron’s thought processes. As astrophysics Professor Coel wrote well on it, I decided to use his analysis instead. Coel concludes: Cameron’s speech is “seriously flawed by a lack of joined-up thinking”.

In other words, although Cameron makes some progress out of the Politically Correct abyss, he ends up all entangled in contradictions between his logic and his policies.

I will assert the following complements to Coel’s work. As Coel points out, the Islamist State, and, more generally Fundamentalist, knife-between-the-teeth, Islam is close to the essential violence found in the Qur’an, and the Hadith. I have documented this pretty well, over the years. Both sacred texts recommend to torture and kill all sorts of “non-believers”, and those deemed not to “believe” anymore (“apostates”).

“Belief” is in the eye of the beholder, thus, if one kills “apostates”, fanatical Islamists will have to spend lots of time killing Muslims, as observed.

Last point: attacking “extremism” in general, promotes silliness. Any thought process starts by considering extremes. This is true in poetry, philosophy, science, and even technology. All and any creative thought process, and, a fortiori, the thinkers who hold them, can be, correctly, viewed as “extremism” at some point, early on. Thus the very title of Cameron’s self-contradictory attack on Islam is embarrassing: if the aim is to get rid of “extremism”, without further characterization, we may as well get rid of any creative process.

The West, and, more generally, civilization itself, whose supremacy was historically founded upon victory on superstition and fossilized thinking, need more from their so-called “leaders”, be it only to tackle the CO2 crisis (and the wars if could lead to).

The title states that “Prime Minister David Cameron set out his plans to address extremism”. What sort of extremism? Well, we all know that we’re referring to extreme versions of Islam, though many politicians are reluctant to spell that out. Let’s see how Cameron fares.

Early on he declares that “Today, I want to talk about … how together we defeat extremism”. It is another nine sentences before he overcomes the “Voldemort effect” and actually names it:

“And because the focus of my remarks today is on tackling Islamist extremism — not Islam the religion — let me say this.”

Well done! Islamist extremism (even if it is accompanied by the hasty and obligatory assurance that Islamism is nothing to do with Islam).

Paul Krugman in Uber and the New Liberal Consensus points out that:“Uber actually brings two things to the taxi market. One is the smartphone revolution… The other is the company whose workers supposedly are free contractors, not employees, exempting the company from most of the regulations designed to protect employees…

…The “new liberal consensus“, argues (based on a lot of evidence) that wages are much less rigidly determined by supply and demand than previously thought, and that public policy can and should nudge employers into paying more. If that’s your policy plan, you really don’t want to see employers undermine it by declaring that they aren’t really employers…promote the use of new technology without prejudicing the interests of workers. But progressives need to work on doing that, and not let themselves get painted as enemies of innovation.”

Notice that Uber got lots of mileage from lying that they are an employer without employees. As technology and innovation advance, the law is left behind, and thus so are the punishments for violating it, or its spirit. We have seen a lot of that in the case of Greece. Lying has been supreme about how and thanks to whom, and most prominently, for whom, money is being created. Sometimes it feels as if we belong to an age where lying is the main industry. Engineering is good, lying, more profitable.

“To compete, Greece needs a strong devaluation — a relative decline of its price level. Trying to lower prices and wages in absolute terms (for example, by slashing wages) would be very difficult, as it would bankrupt many debtors and tenants.

It would arguably be better to inflate prices in the rest of the eurozone…If the rest of the eurozone posts inflation rates of slightly less than 2 percent, as the E.C.B. hopes, Greece would be competitive after a decade or so, provided that its price level stays put…

What about the solution favored by leftists: more money for Greece? No doubt, enormous government spending would bring about a Keynesian stimulus and generate some modest internal growth. However, apart from the fact that this money would have to come from other countries’ taxpayers, this would be counterproductive, as it would prevent the necessary devaluation.”

The question of corrupt economic advice keeps coming back. Dreadful advice keeps on coming: first rescuing the private banks with state money, ruining the state, then austerity, ruining the economy. Now they want to make Greece worthless, because they say it will improve the economy.

By forcing on it a devastating devaluation, do Germans want to buy Greece on the cheap? Often it looks like it. The Greeks own more worthy property than Germans do. This property is valued in Euros. Germans cannot buy enough of it. But they could, if the currency used by Greeks became worthless, which is what many German economists advocate.

Those who want to make Greece worthless say: that would improve the Greek economy. However, the Greek economy depends upon tourism (which is roaring ahead), petroleum imports (which would become immensely expensive if Greece devalued), refined petroleum products (those contracts are in dollars, so would not profit from a devaluation) and shipping (all contracts are in dollars).

Ridiculous ideas are rolled out. Take Finland: it’s in recession, with 10% unemployment, still Finland accuses Greece. But, truly, what Finland needs is the same as what Greece needs: easy money and tons of it. Same observation for the Netherlands. That same “leftist” solution, the one the USA implemented for itself.

Hence why the nefarious advice? Because Europe has many enemies and many economists’ repute depends upon sinking the EU, while Wall Street profits from it.

The advice has been to bleed the patient, until he gets better: that’s austerity. Now the advice is to bury the patient, until it revives, raising from his ashes.

All what Greece needs is an anti-oligarchic revolution. Some in the EU will help achieve it.

And that’s why precisely the hysteria has been so great about sabotaging the EU by kicking Greece out. The powers that be don’t want a successful anti-oligarchic revolution. As all European states are supposed to be in the European Monetary Union, and Greece does not want out, this is the violence one was talking about.

Who says this? No less than Paul Krugman (himself with a PhD from MIT), in a New York Times editorial “The MIT Gang“. I will get back to the murder-friendly attitude of Krugman, who not only extols the MIT influence as a good thing, but moreover glosses over the nefarious influence of American trained economists, “The Chicago Boys“, in destroying democracy. And not just democracy. The role of economic ideology from the American plutocratic universities was so nefarious that tens of thousands were outright assassinated, so that Chicago economics could be implemented. Bad economics is bad in all ways, including the most murderous ones. Not only Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and the Khemr Rouge had murderous economics. Arguably, present day economics may be even more lethal.

MIT Economics Favors Plutocracy (=Pluto Power)

After 2008, the MIT gangsters Krugman effrontly lauds, put trillions of dollars at the disposition of the very banksters who had caused the 2008 crash. Yes, those gentlemen gangsters have names. Those gangsters are so famously, they could be called gangstars. Those stars directed the world’s two most important central banks, or played the top roles, just below the ill-fated Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the IMF, or World Bank, etc. (Krugman sings their praise, and their names, in his “MIT Gang” essay).

The crash was actually the transfer of colossal amounts of money from the banks to a subset of plutocrats, ruining the banks. To refloat the banks, public money (see Greece) was called in, both from Treasuries and from Central Banks. The red graph above depicts that transfer as the scarlet exponential of shame. And no one, among those who control the world, condescend to observe it, let alone, explain it.

Although I was diplomatic enough not to even allude to these horrors, I sent the following comment to the New York Times. It was immediately censored:

The Chicago, and MIT economic departments rule. Who elected them, as our leaders? Who elected the Central Banks, and authorized them to buy at outrageous prices the property of private banks? That’s so-called “Quantitative Easing“… Thus enabling the bankers, banksters and gangsters who caused the crash of 2008 to keep on deciding who wins, and who loses, socioeconomically?

The private banks, extend credit to the richest of the rich.Thus they comfort, and buttress the plutocrats… Who then invite the president to gather money during parties in their mansions.

Why have so few people, so much power? Under which political theory? Which theory advocates that only a few people rule? Few: in Greek, Oligos. To rule: Arkhein. Oligos-Arkein: such a theory is called Oligarchy.

So the few rule. Question: why is a MIT gang better than a Chicago gang, a Wall Street gang, or a Sicilian gang?

Because we owe more respect to a MIT gang than to the Mafia? Why? Did we vote to have so much respect for MIT, we want them, MIT gangsters, to take all the decisions about the society in which we live? Our economic well-beings? Our employment? Our lives?

And when did we switch from democracy (Greek: Demos-Kratos, English: People-Power) to Oligarchy? Did we vote to surrender our powers to various gangs? I gather we did not. Thus, when, and how did this silent coup occur? What measures do we need to take, to return to democracy?

Patrice Ayme’

Note: Some commentators have complained that I am too tough on Krugman: he is a good guy, he is on the side of progress, he is on my side, I am biting a fellow creature. Indeed, Krugman is viewed as the standard bearer of social progress, and not at all the standard bearer of plutocratic universities. So let Krugman talk a little bit more in his own offense in the editorial at hand: : “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the term “Chicago boys” was originally used to refer to Latin American economists, trained at the University of Chicago, who took radical free-market ideology back to their home countries. The influence of these economists was part of a broader phenomenon: The 1970s and 1980s were an era of ascendancy for laissez-faire economic ideas and the Chicago school, which promoted those ideas.

But that was a long time ago. Now a different school is in the ascendant, and deservedly so.”

Notice the pernicious context. What you have to know is that these “Latin American Economists trained at the University of Chicago, who took radical free-market ideology back to theior home countries.”

It sounds innocuous, but actually these “boys” set-up dictatorships in their countries, who killed tens of thousands of people in Argentina alone.

Similar “economic” performance was achieved in Chile, Brazil, and a dozen other Latin American states thus inspired. Nothing that Paul Krugman is allowed to remember while he wants to stay in good standing with plutocracy supreme.

“Europe’s Impossible Dream” proclaims the New York Times’ Paul Krugman. What dream is that? The dream that Europe needs another currency, besides the dollar. All right American supremacists do not say this in so many words… Instead they use convoluted, illogical reasoning, as I will presently demonstrate.

Good propaganda starts with correct facts. Krugman:

“Greece is experiencing a slump worse than the Great Depression, and nothing happening now offers hope of recovery. Spain has been hailed as a success story, because its economy is finally growing — but it still has22 percent unemployment. And there is anarc of stagnation across the continent’s top: Finland is experiencing a depression comparable to that in southern Europe, and Denmark and the Netherlands are also doing very badly.

How did things go so wrong? The answer is that this is what happens when self-indulgent politicians ignore arithmetic and the lessons of history. And no, I’m not talking about leftists in Greece or elsewhere; I’m talking about ultra-respectable men in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels, who have spent a quarter-century trying to run Europe on the basis of fantasy economics.”

Commodities Crashing Worldwide: Not A Euro Problem, Mr. Krugman!

Then Krugman operates his bait and switch:

“To someone who didn’t know much economics, or chose to ignore awkward questions establishing a unified European currency sounded like a great idea. It would make doing business across national borders easier, while serving as a powerful symbol of unity. Who could have foreseen the huge problems the euro would eventually cause?”

Several remarks here: first, for people like Krugman, apparently society and economics is reduced to “doing business”. In truth, having multiple currencies was a major hindrance, I have said this many times. Try a currency in New Jersey, one in New York, one in Connecticut, one in Massachusetts. It’s not just business which will be inconvenienced. Europe has as many states as the USA. Krugman can’t understand this: not smart enough, or with an agenda? You judge.

Commodity Deflation, In Dollars. Not A Euro Crisis, Mr. Krugman!

Good propaganda accuses the scapegoat with wild abandon. According to Nazis, everything was the fault of the Jews, and the French. According to Krugman the ills of the economic world can all be traced to the Euro. Bankers who feed him, are beyond any suspicion. The bait is to enounce correct facts, the switch is to accuse the innocent, in this case “Europe’s Impossible Dream” and the common currency, thus causing unfathomable distraction, away from the real culprits. Krugman:

“Who could have foreseen the huge problems the euro would eventually cause?

Actually, lots of people.”

Who are Krugman’s heroes? Eurosceptics, naturally. Krugman:

“The only big mistake of the euroskeptics[sic] was underestimating just how much damage the single currency would do.

The point is that it wasn’t at all hard to see, right from the beginning, that currency union without political union was a very dubious project. So why did Europe go ahead with it?”

The problem with someone as Krugman, is that he has no idea about European history, whatsoever, except the pro-Nazi propaganda of Lord Keynes. Krugman affects to think Europeans are idiots anxious to please plutocrats, and their obsequious servants:

“Mainly, I’d say, because the idea of the euro sounded so good. That is, it sounded forward-looking, European-minded, exactly the kind of thing that appeals to the kind of people who give speeches at Davos.”

***

Krugman, Or The Pseudo-Left:

Who is Paul Krugman? Not only does he have a bully pulpit at the New York Times, and a Nobel, but he is, according to polls, the most trusted voice by the left… in Europe. Listening to him too uncritically can only lead to anti-Europeanism.

The domination of English is also the domination of the Financial Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and the ever more sneaky New York Times. The Anglosphere’s tendrils are definitively plutocratic in their outreach.

In his very anti-European article, Krugman says that the case for devaluing the Greece currency is overwhelming: I agree with this, the Euro ought to be devalued.

If Greece had its own currency, and devalued massively, it would not profit much economically: Greece’s main import-export activity is to buy petrol and then sells it refined: all these transactions are priced in dollars. Leaving the Euro would make Greece ready to become a satellite of the USA again (complete with colonels).

***

Why are we submitted to so much anti-Europeanism?

Because the plutocrats and their obnoxious servants have interest to say that the problem is the Euro, not banksters, and banksterism, the situation where bankers create money (as credit) and give it to they friends.

Then said friends run away with the money, banks turn around, and ask treasuries and central banks to allow them to make money again. (One way to do this is Quantitative Easing, something Krugman love as it feeds the banksters, who feed him.)

None of this giant financialo-economic drama has to do with the Euro. To imply that Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland have problems because of the Euro is inaccurate (to put it mildly). Switzerland is also pegged to the Euro, and does great, because of its diversified knowledge economy (where pharmaceuticals dominate).

Krugman is aware, but disingenuously denies, that loving the dollar is hating the euro:

“if you were an American expressing doubts you were invariably accused of ulterior motives — of being hostile to Europe, or wanting to preserve the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege.”

And the euro came. For a decade after its introduction a huge financial bubble masked its underlying problems. But now, as I said, all of the skeptics’ fears have been vindicated.”

Because France and Germany have had enough to fight each other. The two countries are roughly comparable in all ways, economically and financially. They are converging demographically. They used to be the same country for five centuries, a time during which a unified Germany, and a German language was created.

The re-creation of a unified Germany, after 1,000 years, without, led to near continuous war between France and Germany, for, fundamentally, philosophical reasons.

France won, both sides are now sister republics, ready for total reunification. Thus they need a common currency. Then the in-betweens (truly pieces of France which were torn away from France, to make France weaker) cannot survive without using that same currency. Then one has to add contiguous areas with the same socioeconomic level (Austria, Northern Italy, Catalogne; the latter two long part of French territory, especially if one defines France as more than just the so-called “kingdom of France“, which was often a very small, relevant territory inasmuch as it was supposed to be the imperial seat). At this point one is well above 200 million people with the same currency, and a GDP only second to the USA.

This territory is the old Francia which founded Western Civilization. Western Civilization is not just Jerusalem, Athens plus Rome, as many have it. It’s also the Franks and the tolerant melting pot they imposed on the Germano-Gallo-Romans, with their home made, advanced, pseudo-Christian philosophy.

How can the rest of Europe be excluded?

The USA acquired its common currency during the Secession War. So far, the attempt to secede in Europe are rather meek. Let’s keep them this way.

Naturally, the USA’s patriots can only hate to have a second world reserve currency. The dollar as world currency was imposed on Keynes through the substitution of the crucial document for another one.

Paul Krugman never mentions the felony that gave rise, over Keynes’ obstinate resistance, to the dollar as world currency.

Europe is not an impossible dream. Should it become so, so will human civilization. Because Europe is a toy model of the global problem of nationalities.

More fundamentally, today’s civilization, all the way to China, Japan and Patagonia or South Africa, was invented mostly in Europe. Admitting it is impossible, is admitting a nice future is impossible.

Is all lost? Did American europhobic university professors win? Not sure. Hollande and Merkel are working on a Eurozone government, democratically anchored through a subset of the European Parliament. It’s high time. “Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre!” (nationalism is war) said French president Mitterrand in one of his last discourses. Ironically, Chancellor Kohl had proposed further political union when he signed on the Euro project, and Mitterrand, then hindered by a divided government, turned him down.

I am sure Frau Doktor Merkel remembers this, and will seize the opportunity.

Doctor Rabelais said, five centuries ago: “L’ignorance est la mere de tous les vices.” That naivety was a social, civilizational and juridical error well known to the Romans, which Sade corrected stridently. The broadly educated professor Rabelais wanted to foster knowledge. That meant to destroy the power of the Church (to which Rabelais belonged, as a Franciscan monk).

The Church, the Bible, Jesus, Mohammed, the Qur’an all insist that disobeying (Allah) is the source of all vice. Rabelais said: no. Instead, being brought up affectionately by ignorance is where viciousness comes from.

Rabelais Made The Church Grotesque

However the truth is more sinister: ignorance mothers most vices, in otherwise good people. Yet, there are also plenty of bad people out there, motivated not by ignorance, but by knowledge.

Those cognoscenti can be motivated by Vengeance, Imagined Victimization, The Will To Power, the Will To Extermination, Cruelty, Sadism. Those emotions are not the children of ignorance. Far from it. They are children of knowledge.

That was a point of the Marquis De Sade. This is one reason why many of his anti-heroes are politicians: they know human nature, and, during their vacations, torture people, to foster this knowledge some more. Far from protecting from vice, knowlege, and the thirst for knowledge, can attract vice.

Sade’s heroine Justine, is more successful, the more wicked she gets, thus demonstrating that viciousness rules not just logic, but apparently the universe (the point the Cathars had already made, on a grandiose scale).

Many people will whine that such moral turpitude could not possibly be. Sade had got to be a very bad person for just having such an idea to tarnish all of humanity with. The idea that knowledge can be criminogene, and vicious is intrinsic to man. Napoleon agreed: he imprisoned Sade, for life, because the philosopher had caricatured the dictator and his countess of a spouse (the plutophile creole Josephine). Yet those ideas were the central principle of the Roman Republic, and the religion it brought forth, Christianism.

The very fact that the 99% do not want to understand what Sade pointed out, that vice was a central part of human nature, and that having plenty of knowledge could make someone more, rather than less, prone to vice, enables the banksters to own the world, and to claim that all the problems with finance have to do with their victims, the … Greeks, and not at all with those bankers who stole, with a little bit of help from their plutocratic friends, all the money.

Ignorance enables the exploitation of the 99% by the .1%. Cruelty, Will to Power, Metaphysical Denial, the rage of the Dark Side, explain the motivation of the .1%. Denying the latter, the vices which motivate the .1%, enables to deny the former, that there is an exploitation by the .1%, that we are all Greece. It’s a sort of religion of cluelessness.

Among the sheep, there is happiness in congregating around simple, time honored ways.

Religions pull people together again. It could be the religion of the Republic, as under the Romans. In this case the religion served the Public.

Superstitious religions are much more frequent: they serve madness, by obliging “believers” to believe the unbelievable, thus to suspend reason, and fascistically follow those who are with god(s).

Human beings are one with reason. Suspending reason is suspending themselves. It can only be achieved violently, explicitly or not. That’s why millions, even tenths of millions, were killed in the name of Christianism and Islam.

Making A Religion From Killing People

Indeed, oligarchies and plutocracies are more frequent than republics, the history of civilization shows. A republic is much harder to achieve. Calling on the fascist instinct to obey those with access to weapons, and the training and mentality to use them, is much easier.

Sometimes, there are spectacular variants to superstitious, fascist religions. The Aztecs lived at high altitude, and had little protein (the Incas lived at even higher altitude, but had engineered potatoes, which are full of proteins). So the Aztecs religion recommended to fetch large, nutritious animals. However, Mesoamerica had no cattle or sheep, lamas or vicunas. The camels and horses had long been exterminated. The only animal which could walk to his fate in Tenochtitlan, was man.

So the Aztec religion recommended to kill people. Well fed Aztecs could not be defeated by those they ate… Until Cortez elite, but minuscule, army showed up. Cortez had little trouble to raise an army among the Natives, and exterminate Aztecs, and their religion.

The Romans exterminated several major religions which condone killing people as a matter of faith. The Gallic religion was the foremost, and largest such example. From Caesar to under Nero, it took a bit more than a century for Roman armies to eliminate the Druids and their theocratic plutocracy. The Franks would then take care of the savage Germanic religion. It took four centuries.

Islamophiles will howl to the sky that the fanatic was not following a religion of peace. True enough. The true Islam is a religion of war.

However, it’s beneath the dignity of, or maybe against the religion of, the Politically Correct and Philosophically Stupid (PCPS), to read any of the sacred texts of Islam.

The Qur’an orders believers to kill unbelievers. Such verses are unambiguous, and starts as soon as the first (which is the second) chapter of the Qur’an:

“And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter… and fight them until fitnah is no more, and religion is for Allah.” (Qur’an 2:191, The Cow)

Islamist so-called “scholars” make impressive gymnastics to tell you that what you just read is all about peace. A preferred trick is to not translate “fitnah”. Fitnah means “strife”. In other words, Muslims are ordered to kill and kill and kill until all resistance (fitnah) has ceased.

Naturally, Muslim “scholars” contest the straightforward explanations of the texts they read ad nauseam . Why? How? The Qur’an orders them to use “every stratagem“… Including lying, which is expressly ordered too:

But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practise regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.— translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali

What to do with a terroristic religion?

The Celtic religion, and Carthage’s religion, were eliminated violently, by the Republic. Rome tolerated all religions, as long as they did not cause death, mayhem, or conditions bringing them forth.

The Republic, as a religion, can be peaceful (Italian Republics showed this). Hinduism is peaceful: with one million gods, there are so many leaders and emotions to follow, that none can exert too much of a weight.

There was a sort of betrayal of the West by its own intellectuals: they told us that Islam had to be respected. Whereas the entire Western civilization was built upon replacing superstition by reason and jurisdiction. Thus the West was built upon NOT respecting the superstitious religion, Christianism, beyond reason. So why to extend the courtesy of respecting Islam more than Christianism?

Is it because Islam is so much more violent that thinkers are afraid to be critical? Or is it racism? It’s good enough for them?

The terrible war between Sparta and Athens which destroyed Greece, started because Sparta wanted to be seen as the hegemon of Greece. Whereas, truly, all indicators were that Athens was the rising hegemon.

And the reasons for this were deep: the racist, fascist exploitative model of Sparta, far from being a leader, was going down, whereas Athens, whom Pericles described as an “Open Society“, was going up. Athens is the leader (hegemon) that we are following today.

Smart people learn from history, and France, in particular, has long pondered Athens’ fate.

Balancing a budget is worthy, as long as there are not excellent reasons to make it unbalanced.

A military situation is an excellent reason for unbalancing the budget of a state. The USA generated a massive deficit in World War Two. So did Britain, or France.

Hegemon Celebrates In Style Victory Over Germany In The Case Of Greece, July 14, 2015

The USA deficit was from credit extended by the USA, to the USA. In other words it was convertible into a tax. The debt could be extinguished by taxation. And that is exactly what FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower did (tax rates were hiked up as high as 93% under Ike).

The British or French debts were credited by the USA, and that meant a sort of slavery, looking forward, as happened. France has seriously recovered. In August 1914, 38 million Frenchmen were invaded by 122 million German speakers. Now there are significantly more young Frenchmen, than young Germans.

Right now, the French Republic’s army is making war, or containing organized outlaws on several continents (South America, Africa, and Eurasia) and many countries. The French government does not have the money to do so. Thus the French government ought to keep its budget unbalanced. The French imbalance is targetted at 4.5% of GDP (in violation of Euro regulations by 50%).

British budgetary imbalance is only at 3.7%. The price Britain pays for this better budgetary balance, is to play now only a puny military role… relative to France. France does not like that, her only serious ally being now, once again, the USA. Same old same old, just as in the 1780s…

Germany has a primary budget imbalance of zero percent. Which may look balanced, but is not, because it’s mentally imbalanced to count cents, while Europe burns.

A republic which does not defend its values is not a Republic.

Balancing a budget can kill an economy: the Greek GDP is somewhat down 30% from its peak. However Greece has a primary budget excedent: that means that the Greek government spends less than it receives in taxes, fees, etc. The reason for the Greek overall current account deficit is payment of interest to (world government’s) institutions such as the ECB, the ironically denominated European Stability Fund, the IMF, etc.

The French government knows all of this, and is, truly, the real hegemon of Europe. So when the French president drew the line, Germans, most of them against keeping Greece is the Eurozone, according to polls, had to capitulate.

Another 85 billion Euros is going Greece’s way. Dr. Merkel, in the end did the reasonable thing, what the French government told her to do (and she overruled her hawkish, asnd somewhat deranged finance minister).

However, the Germans are angry. Very angry. The New York Times ponder “Germany’s Destructive Anger“.

The author, Jacob Soll, an American, played a role in Greek debt drama (rumors are that the debt may have been overestimated). Says he: “German anger, and we know they are angry. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble was reported to have started yelling during Saturday night’s negotiations. France and Italy have both made huge loans to Greece, but neither country has expressed hostility to Greece. Why is Germany so angry?

As an economic historian, I got a taste of this resentment…”

Indeed why are the Germans so angry? Because they are resentful. About what? Nietzsche was so intrigued by German Resentment, that some view him, first, as the philosopher of resentment.

How did Germans got so crazy, once again?

Mr. Soll, a professor of history and accounting at the University of Southern California, is the author of “The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations.” He concludes: “German attendees circled me to explain how the Greeks were robbing the Germans. They did not want to be victims anymore. While I certainly accepted their economic points and, indeed, the point that European Union member countries owe Germany so much money that more defaults could sink Germany, it was hard, in Munich at least, to see the Germans as true victims.

Here lies a major cultural disconnect, and also a risk for the Germans. For it seems that their sense of victimization has made them lose their cool, both in negotiations and in their economic assessments. If the Germans are going to lead Europe, they can’t do it as victims.”

Says Paul: “Germany’s sense of victimization does seem real, and is a big problem for its neighbors.”

Germany’s sense of victimization is how it got to hate the French, the Slavs, and the Jews. Just read Hitler’s Mein Kampf: it starts with Germany victimized by the French, then smoothly transit to it being victimized by the Jews…

Why so angry?

Because the truth is out: Germany is not the hegemon of Europe. It tried, once again, and completely failed. Once again. The French Republic stood in the way, gathered around her a more powerful coalition than Germany, in the Eurozone itself, and then added the IMF.

Meanwhile, the USA had rallied the French position. The USA has created for its economy 13 times more money than the Eurozone.

France won. France won even Merkel.

France is the hegemon of Europe, Germany the moribund. Because, assuredly, only the mentally moribund would strike such a stupid position about Greece with so much obstinacy, absent any capacity for reason and introspection.